A Glimpse Beyond: A Space Opera Adventure (Infinite Horizons Book 2) Read online

  A GLIMPSE BEYOND

  ©2022 J.D. SULIVAN

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  CONTENTS

  ALSO IN SERIES

  1. New Beginnings

  2. Rumblings

  3. The Unknown

  4. Intervention

  5. Warnings

  6. Modifications

  7. Mercies

  8. Additions

  9. Progress

  10. Developments

  11. Earth Bound

  12. Home Away from Home

  13. A Day to Remember

  14. A Night to Never Forget

  15. Considerations

  16. Shades of Conflict

  17. Triage

  18. Kwaaganarr

  19. Complications

  20. Consequences

  21. Second Homecoming

  22. Preparations

  23. No Retreat

  24. Clarity

  25. No Surrender

  26. A Glimpse Beyond

  Thank you for reading A Glimpse Beyond

  ALSO IN SERIES

  Escaping Gravity

  A Glimpse Beyond

  A Clash of Empires

  CHAPTER 1

  NEW BEGINNINGS

  Dillon had never really thought about it, but as it turned out, proving you’re a time-traveler is a lot tougher than it sounds.

  It hadn’t been much easier to convince himself, honestly. He and Sherisza had arrived some seventy years before the time they’d left, but if it wasn’t for Daevol tapping into newsfeeds, Dillon wouldn’t have known. The crushing weight of the time shift had left him unconscious, as massive usages of the Chrono Drive often did, but in the vast expanse of space, there wasn’t anything that stood out to say they’d gone back in time. Only the digital clock–the one that let Dillon know what time it was back home on Earth–going haywire said anything was amiss.

  For her part, Sherisza had seemed unperturbed about the entire ordeal. Dillon had no idea how many times she had gone forward or back through history. By her words, this was the first time she had gone back, and she had only gone forward the once, jumping those six years ahead to avoid the plague that had wiped out her people and planet. He’d expected going back to her home world in the past and seeing it repopulated might be too much for her to take, but she hadn’t hesitated at all.

  Mostly, it had to do with them being so far back in the past. She and her sibling hadn’t even been born yet, so there was little to anchor her in this different time. She had brought them down to Kiandar with Daevol’s help, the ship’s AI guiding her past sentries and trackers and anything else that might’ve led to them having to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions. From there, she had begun the work of finding those people history had said disappeared without a trace, to see if they had, in fact, come forward to the “present” aboard her ship.

  It was a lot for Dillon to wrap his mind around. Sherisza had spent months going through records and history, trying to identify people who might have disappeared because she’d gone back in time and rescued them. Per her twin brother’s theories, history had to account for any changes made by time travelers, and so that had given Sherisza a place to start looking. Now, she was trying to convince those people to come “back” to her and Dillon’s present time, beyond the ravages of the plague, to repopulate Kiandar and its people.

  It hadn’t been easy, though. The first groups, not surprisingly, hadn’t believed she was a time traveler until Sherisza risked bringing them aboard her ship, the Malshekt, where the proof lay in digital records. Even still, it had taken a great deal of convincing to get them to agree to abandon their lives and go forward in time. Only the gravity of what had happened to Kiandar and the afterimages of the near-total annihilation of the Kiandarian people had done it.

  And reliving the finding of her dead family had torn Sherisza’s heart out. Dillon was angry that she’d had to and yet proud that she was willing to do so to save her people. She was an exceptional woman, and he was proud to be her mate, different species though they were.

  The lioness woman of Kiandar had a holodisplay in front of her now, working through the schematics of their phase-cloaking device. It would be necessary for future rescues; if anyone saw the Malshekt, it could get them captured or destroyed or asked a lot of questions about time travel. Secrecy would be the lifeblood of these rescue missions, and Dillon knew Sherisza wanted to complete her project rather than buy cloaking technology from someone else.

  “How’s that warp inverter looking?” he asked.

  Sherisza glanced at him, those golden eyes shining. “I have a good feeling about this, Dillon. As off-the-cuff as your suggestion may have felt, you were on the right track. Daevol and I are working through turning the theory into reality. I suspect we may have a design for the prototype in a few days, and then we can fine-tune things from there.”

  “Well, we’ve got time before we get back to Kiandar,” he said.

  They did have that, at least. They were cruising along at standard warp speed, letting the Chrono Drive take a break from bending or folding time. The slower speed accomplished several other ends as well. It allowed the two families they’d rescued to try to catch up on where they were in the future; it helped avoid suspicion from the governments of the known galaxy over where they were rescuing those Kiandarians from; and it further gave Dillon’s parents time to quell the uproar over his having killed the president of the Quarran Dominion.

  Dillon was still working through that himself. He didn’t feel bad about it, though he was sure he never wanted to shoot someone in the head again. President MacNault had been behind the biological weapon that had nearly exterminated the entire Kiandarian race, and all over some religious belief that they were a lesser creation and somehow evil for being able to crossbreed with humans. When the man had threatened and, indirectly, tried to kill Sherisza, the last of her kind, Dillon had to do something.

  And do something he had.

  He’d saved her life and her race, and s
he had in turn saved his life before anyone had been able to take him–or them–into custody. After that, they had cast their inhibitions aside, no longer denying their feelings for each other. Now, she considered Dillon her mate, and though he was still sorting through the details in his mind, he was thinking of marrying her and having children. It was incredible how much his life had changed in just a few months. And it all went back to this brilliant Kiandarian woman picking him out of half a million or more applicants to be her apprentice.

 

  Dillon instinctively looked up at the sound of the AI’s voice, but the message didn’t make him nervous at all. The Kwaagi were a reptilian race, like upright, bipedal dinosaur folk, but they were friendly to Sherisza and Dillon. They had agreed to defend Kiandar from any sort of intrusions, whether by thieves, scavengers, or vengeful members of the Quarran Dominion. And so, Dillon flicked a switch on his front console three times, flashing the Malshekt’s lights in greeting to the approaching escorts.

  The Kwaagi fighter pilots executed a stunning rollover maneuver in salute before taking places on either side of the Malshekt. Whatever most people thought of reptilian races, the Kwaagi military was second to none and its fighter pilots were incredible. Thanks to the work Dillon and Sherisza had done on two of their twenty-one-ship wings and to the rescue of one of their emperor’s distant nieces, the Kwaagi were quite protective of Sherisza, her ship, and her planet. And, of course, her mate.

  “Captain Rousilarru, we have been dispatched to escort you to Outer Dock Seventeen orbiting your world of Kiandar,” came the message over the hailing frequency. The Kwaagi spoke with some hisses, drawn-out S sounds, clacking of their teeth, and clucking of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. To the translator chip Dillon had installed behind his left ear, though, they may as well have been speaking perfect Terran English.

  “Acknowledged. Thank you for your protection, gentlemen,” Sherisza said.

  “You guys want to come over for dinner? We’re grilling some steaks tonight,” Dillon joked. He was answered only by uncharacteristic hissing laughter from the fighter pilots.

  “Our galley is already quite crowded these days,” Sherisza commented.

  “Could be worse, we could be eating and sleeping on the flight deck for days like those guys do,” he said with a nod toward the Kwaagi fighter off the starboard side.

  Still, what she’d said was true. With two Kiandarian families, each comprised of four, it was a tight squeeze to get everyone into the galley to share a meal. But that was something Sherisza insisted on. Just as she enjoyed cooking for herself and Dillon, she did so for their passengers as well. It was a tradition among their people, one the guest families obviously appreciated, though they remained a bit stiff around Dillon. None of them had ever met a human before, and they didn’t speak or understand a word of Terran English, so it was strange to them to share a meal with him.

  The fact that Sherisza considered Dillon her mate did little to alleviate the awkwardness, but no one was rude about it, at least. Dillon was glad the families got time to come out of their cabins, as two adults and two children per cabin was easily as cramped as the galley. At the least, the children were allowed to play together in Dillon’s old cabin, the one he’d stopped using once Sherisza had invited him to stay in hers. What the other Kiandarians thought of that, Dillon preferred not to think about, because ultimately it didn’t matter.

  “Are they going to settle in your old hometown?” Dillon asked at length.

  Sherisza blew out a sigh. “Yes, because that is where the cleanup began. Our friends in the Kystar Alliance have already gotten the essential utilities online again, so the town will have all the amenities it needs for them to begin subsistence programs. Once we have enough of my people to populate the town, it should be able to farm and keep its water and power supplies going. From there, it will be a matter of growing the population, but that will take time.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Your people didn’t often have more than one set of twins, did they?”

  “Not typically, unless one or both children perished for whatever reason. Our population was slow to build compared to your own,” she said. “With such a limited genetic pool and our predisposition to have only one pair of children, repopulating Kiandar will not be easy. But we have hope, and a future, and that… that is in part thanks to you, Dillon.”

  He smiled but looked around the side of his chair. The corridor of the Malshekt was quiet, the other couples and their children tucked in their cabins. “How many children did you want to have with me?” he asked when he turned back to her.

  Sherisza let a little sigh out of her leonine nose, reaching across her console to run her clawed fingers down the photo clipped to its front. It was a picture of her twin brother, Daevol–after whom the ship’s AI was named–riding on a rope swing with Sherisza’s children. She was still rattled by their deaths, along with those of all her people, but she was healing now. Having gone back to Kiandar to properly memorialize them had helped her a lot.

  Not to mention finally seeing the man responsible dead.

  When she turned back to Dillon, her face was downturned a bit in her blushing pose. “As many as we can,” she said quietly.

  The answer put a warmth in Dillon’s already hot-blooded, nineteen-year-old heart. Never in a million years would he have guessed he’d end up in love with a Kiandarian, or that he’d be thinking about having children before he was technically legal to drink alcohol back home. But as he thought of the children already on board, the echo of the sound of little feet padding up and down the corridor of the ship played through his mind and his heart, and it felt right. Their relationship may have only been a few months old, but everything about it felt right.

  “So, a pair every year?” he asked.

  Her ears perked up at that. “Oh, no. Every third year at the most. As I told you, Dillon, my people only go into season in the autumn, and not while we are nursing children. So, it would likely be only every third year.”

  “And we could start a couple of months from now?”

  Sherisza shrugged. “If you like. I know you and, more pointedly, your parents wanted to see you finish your law degree before we did so. I can be patient, especially now that my dream of rescuing my people from the past has become reality.”

  “I’m sure you’ve noticed, but teenaged humans aren’t exactly known for patience,” he said, and she chuckled. “I think we should let God… or your goddess… decide.”

  “I am agreeable to that.”

  Dillon released the harness of his co-pilot’s seat. “Daevol, you mind flying us for a while? I think it’s time we got dinner started.”

 

  Sherisza got up, too, and while they had the flight deck and corridor to themselves, she and Dillon shared a long, passionate kiss.

  Dillon had only had his translation chip for a few months, but it already felt like a lifetime ago that he couldn’t understand others. It made meals a little tedious, as Sherisza had to interpret his words to their guests, but he was glad to at least be able to chat, however slowly, with the Kiandarians. They were immensely curious about humans, doubly so because they knew he was sleeping with Sherisza, and Dillon tried to tell them as much as he could without painting either too bright or too dark a picture.

  The Enarrii Conflict was a constant focus of their chatter, these Kiandarians having come from before that war had even happened. They didn’t know the Enarrii any more than they knew humankind, so to find their world had technically gone to war against both required Sherisza to do a lot of explaining. It was just as well to Dillon, since he knew little about that war himself, and he got to see how the Kiandarians had viewed it and, as a result, humanity. There was still much he didn’t know, but he had learned quite a bit. Not surprisingly, he found Kiandarians had learned to treat humans with the same suspicion humans often treated each other.

  I
n the end, he could sense their guests were pleased that the conflict had ended and there had been peace between Kiandar and Earth. They certainly seemed to take Dillon’s and Sherisza’s relationship in a new light after that, though their customs were different. They were courteous enough to say nothing, probably because they knew he could understand them. Had they been able to hide their words behind Sherisza’s interpreting, they may have said far more. Dillon tried not to worry about it either way.

  When the meal was finished, Dillon took the children to his old cabin and introduced them to Galactic Command. They were old enough to appreciate a good starship battle game, yet young enough that they didn’t care that the game was human-centric. It also helped that humanity was fighting some bug creatures from the reaches rather than any of the races they shared the known galaxy with. The children did get rowdy at times, though. Much like the lion cubs they resembled to a degree, they were playful and energetic, and none of them wanted to leave when their parents came to get them. Only Dillon’s promise to play with them again the following day earned their parents a reprieve, and he sighed wistfully as they left.

  His children by Sherisza probably wouldn’t look like him, he knew. How much of his cocoa skin and startling green eyes would bleed through to them was a mystery. But the more time he spent with the Kiandarian youngsters, the less it mattered–and it hadn’t mattered all that much to begin with. Even if they looked fully leonine like their mother, they’d be beautiful, and he knew his own mother’s heart would melt the first time she held them. That made him think of his grandmothers, Malinda and Ruth, and how excited they’d be to have great-grandchildren. It might take a bit of explaining why the children were lion cubs, but they’d love them, Dillon had no doubts.